A few thoughts on Portal 2

While I still have it fresh in my mind I want to put down my thoughts about the single-player campaign in Portal 2. I haven't played any of the co-op, primarily because of the mysterious, ongoing problem with the PSN. However, I completed the solo campaign, and while I agree with many of the criticisms Michael Barnes made in his review at No High Scores, I greatly enjoyed Portal 2. I don't think it's a 10/10 masterpiece, but it is a very good game.

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Capsule: Beyond Good & Evil HD

Status: Complete, achievements 100%

Put this on your (virtual) box: The image is mightier than the stick!

Most Intriguing Idea: That years of word-of-mouth would produce a strong market for an up-rezzed version of a largely ignored game

Best Design Decision: Making the protest signs more legible

Worst Design Decision: The camera behavior, especially in the Slaughterhouse area


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The classic Alzheimer's aggregates are linked

The classic neuropathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease are the appearance of amyloid plaques composed primarily of amyloid beta (Aβ) peptides, and neurofibrillary tangles composed mainly of hyperphosphorylated tau protein. For many years, research into treatments for Alzheimer's disease proceeded on the hypothesis that the plaques were toxic to the surrounding neurons. More recently, however, evidence has shown that soluble Aβ oligomers may be the primary toxic species. A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports this hypothesis by showing that Aβ oligomers isolated from the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers cause neuronal degradation and improper phosphorylation of tau (1). This paper is open access, so open it up and read along.

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The trouble with Tripitaka

During the "Females on Female Characters" panel at PAX, Susan Arendt argued briefly in support of Tripitaka (Trip), a character from Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This appreciation seemed bizarre to me, so the moment stuck in my mind. Enslaved was a gorgeous game with phenomenal voice acting, decently expressive gameplay, and very bad writing, of which I thought Trip was a prime example. The game apparently wants us to like and sympathize with Trip, but she struck me as a perfectly reprehensible person in general, and seemed to represent patriarchal stereotypes more than she undermined them.

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Two (too?) easy games

The most difficult part of reviewing a game is reviewing the difficulty. A few games — Super Meat Boy, I Wanna be the Guy — can uncontroversially be called hard, but the essential question is actually whether they are too hard. Since that level of difficulty depends not only on the individual player's skills and experience, but also on his values, it can be difficult to state what goes over the line. It is even harder to accurately say whether a game is too easy, primarily because most reviewers are skilled and experienced gamers, many of them drawn to the hobby during its early days when challenge was practically all a game could offer in terms of fun. "Too easy" often equates to boring, perhaps to the detriment of games like Soul Bubbles. I have seen the "too easy" charge leveled at two games I played recently, Kirby's Epic Yarn and de Blob 2. In both cases, the statement is wrong, but for very different reasons.

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PAX East 2011 Roundup

I spent the weekend at PAX East, checking out upcoming games and meeting great people. That last one was a bit more difficult thanks to the enormous size of the BCEC, but that size made panels much easier to get into and allowed for an expanded and much nicer exposition floor. In case you weren't there, here are some impressions...

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Arcology

When I was a boy my family used to joke that crows didn't fly in Vestavia. Our suburb, like so many others, had a knotty system of streets that made direct travel impossible, and zoning that made driving a necessity. My high school was less than 2/3 of a mile direct distance from my house, but it was a two-mile drive down a road that became pretty backed up around 7:45 AM. Of course nobody rode the bus. Suburban living allowed my brother and I to go to a good school, live in a big house, and play in the woods frequently as we grew up. It also used a lot of gas.

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Demo-lition

I think I should start with the reason I placed the pre-order in the first place, which is that I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins a great deal. I didn't particularly care for the combat, which suffered from having continuous time and lousy AI. I also thought that much of what BioWare did to make the game seem gritty, especially the blood spattering, was unintentionally comical. However, I thought the game had some interesting ideas hiding behind its surface pageantry of turgid Tolkienism, and the writing for some of the characters (Shale!) was really great. So, when I heard Dragon Age 2 was coming out I placed an order, and when I heard there was a demo, I downloaded it. Having thoroughly gone through the demo, however, I decided to cancel the pre-order.

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Capsule: Kirby's Epic Yarn

Status: Game completed; some extra levels still locked

Put this on your box: The hardest easiest platformer ever made!

Most intriguing idea: That a platformer can be challenging without forcing you to restart a level every time you fail.

Best design decision: Getting rid of "death".

Worst design decision: The method for getting the extra levels in Grass Land.

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The Text Blues: But I Digress...

It seems like most of the people who wrote reviews of 999 thought very highly of it. I'm not sure why that was; I found the game to be a fairly tedious exercise in the repetition of insufficiently interesting puzzles. 999 creates this problem for itself because of its structure. The enforced replays that are central to 999's design and fiction ask for more from the puzzles and dialogue than they are able to contribute as art or entertainment. In addition to that, I felt that 999 had a tendency to undermine its plot and atmosphere during its moments of exposition, because it did not make proper use of the communicative elements on hand.

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Capsule: Katamari Forever

Status: Normal mode and vast majority of drive mode complete

Put this on your box: Katamari is too unique to be derivative of anything else, so we made it derivative of itself!

Most intriguing idea: That a Katamari game would benefit from HD graphics. (It says "intriguing, folks, not "correct")

Best design decision: Katamari Drive compensates for some of the older games' deficiencies.

Worst design decision: The Prince's jump, which proves that the Move is an improvement on something.

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Why HisH doesn't fire until it sees the whites of PRFAR's eyes

The enzyme imidazole glycerophosphate synthase (IGPS) can be a bit of a lump. If you bind just one substrate it doesn't do anything, even though its two active sites are separated by more than 30 Å. Only if the second substrate also binds does catalysis actually go at anything like a respectable rate. In a recent paper in Structure researchers from Yale report evidence that this change of pace results from a change in dynamics.

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